Riese and I decided to collaborate on the Brittana wedding episode recap, so she watched with her amazing girlfriend, Abby, and sent me her notes, which you will find lovingly folded into this recap like when you bite into a chocolate and (surprise!) there’s caramel inside!

It’s Brittany and Santana’s wedding day, and so everyone — except for Quinn, who is not here, which makes zero sense and is never even addressed in the episode, despite her absence glaring like the sun on sheet of fresh snow — descends on a barn in rural Indiana where Santana and Brittany have decided to get married. For one thing, same-sex marriage is illegal in Ohio. And for another thing, Jennifer Coolidge gave birth to Brittany in this very barn on accident like a kind of Mary/Jesus thing. Gloria Estefan feels very grossed out about the story of Brittany’s barnyard birth, but she’s all in on the wedding, so she says she can work with this situation.

Please let this be the unicorn Santana bought me for our wedding. Please let this be the unicorn Santana bought me for our wedding.

Bend and snap!

Whoa, the rhythm really got her.

Tina is not interested in working with this situation. She’s wearing heels and of course they’re making her drag 700-pound bales of hay around. But Kurt ignores her protests because Brittany is hardcore freaking out about getting married on this farm. She’s pretty sure this building is structurally unsound, and Martina Navratilova rejected an offer to officiate the ceremony owing to the fact that she is not ordained and also has no idea who Brittany and Santana are. Kurt calms Brittany down and offers up his dad to preside over the ceremony, which feels just right, actually.

Riese: Santana’s happy ‘cause there aren’t any men in this scene. (Also, Artie’s shirt is hurting my feelings.)

Three different times in this episode, people make reference to this barn crashing or catching on fire, and when you add that to the scene a couple of episodes ago where everyone was angels, I was 100 percent convinced this was going to end with every Original New Direction-er dying, and like a fade-to-black shot of Quinn standing in the rubble holding a flamethrower. Just the ultimate Fuck You, is what I was convinced was going to happen. It did not, though, and I enjoyed the episode a lot more the second time through when I wasn’t feeling like Emily Fields, waiting for a car to drive through my living room wall at any second.

Riese: Brittany thinks the barn is gonna fall down and kill everybody. That’d be quite a season finale! The next five episodes would just be funerals / musical tributes. Sorry I’M DARK.

If Britney Spears shows up and tries to steal my thunder, I’ll be like WHAM! POW!

And I’ll kick her in the shins!

Riese: It’s Say Yes To The Dress Starring Santana Lopez. They’re doing hokey dancing so the girls can envision how these dresses would hold up in the worst case scenarios.

Wedding dress fashion montage! Santana and Brittany do not want to see each other, though, because they want to avoid 9,000 years of bad luck. (Some couples are just destiny in every lifetime in every reality on every plane of the space-time continuum. Deal with it.) The song here is, I don’t know what it is, and the lyrics are so generic that even Google doesn’t know, and it’s not sung by any of the Glee kids. It sounds like an Old Navy commercial. The dresses are nuts! Brittany wears a normal one. Santana wears a flapper one. Brittany wears a Calamity Jane one with cowboy boots. Santana wears one made by a fairy godmother. Brittany wears the one Helena was married in on that commune on Orphan Black. Santana wears one made of an albino mermaid. Brittany wears one she burgled off of Stevie Nicks. Santana wears one made of ping pong table nets. Brittany wears one that’s a Christmas tree from outer space. Santana wears one from the Bette Porter collection.

Brittany wears The One, and Santana sees her, and Brittany flips her shit. The next day, she brings a chicken into the choir room to ritualistically slaughter it to counteract the bad luck, and then one of my favorite Brittana scenes ever. Santana pulls her by the elbow to the door, goes, “Nope. No. Put it down. This is ridiculous.” And Brittany goes, “This is your lucky day, sir.” And they just sit the chicken on the floor in the hallway and close the choir room door.

Ha ha ha! Oh, man! I cannot wait to get out of here and start touring with Beyonce!

Is Mercedes really going on tour with Beyonce?

I never get to go on tour with Beyonce!

Mercedes and Rachel try to help Santana and Brittany work out their seating arrangement but it’s weird because Rachel doesn’t want to sit next to Sam because she doesn’t want to upset Finn’s mom, and then there’s the question of where to put Sue, and Santana says if Sue comes, she will not be attending. Mercedes wisely points out that inviting Sue means there’s an 80 percent chance she’ll ruin their lives, but not inviting Sue ups that chance to 100 percent.

Heather Hogan is an Autostraddle managing editor who lives in New York City with her partner, Stacy, and their cackle of rescued pets. She's a member of the Television Critics Association, the Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association, and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer critic. You can also find her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

49 Comments

I’m not even ashamed to admit I cried like a baby during this episode. It was beautiful. Yes, the pacing was weird and there were some eye-rolling moments. But I don’t care. My two OTPs are married. The wedding was beautiful and I am so happy for the couples. Gah! This episode will go down in history, at least for me, and these couples will always have a special place in my heart.

I know some Brittana fans were upset at the wedding being shared by Klaine, but I can’t be mad about that. It was a very special moment between friends. And Glee very fairly gave both couples equal spotlight.

I definitely cried a couple of times. For me, I was watching Glee before I ever saw The L Word or watched Grey’s Anatomy, and so Santana was the first queer Latina character that I think I ever saw on TV. And i get really invested in the shows I watch, so that was amazing for me, to finally see myself represented like that. To see her keep getting stories and lines and to have her relationship with Brittany progress the way it did, it was so affirming for me.

Ugh, it just made me really, really happy. Also, when her abuela showed up, I definitely cried. (also Heather, I really love your version of Sue’s comments about what the bible says about homosexuality).

I was so excited for this episode, this moment…Brittana means the world to me and I am glad and proud that this happened. Also they brought back the Troubletones which in my opinion is the 2nd best thing glee ever did. I did miss Quinn tho, I know it was a scheduling thing that prevented Dianna from coming back but they could have made some comment about it…I want her to have a happy ending too…YAY Mike Chang!!

My headcanon is that she didn’t come because Rachel didn’t ask her to be her date. I mean, Quinn showed up when Rachel called everyone to help jump-start the new Glee club again, so obviously Santana and Brittany fucked up by not making Rachel hand over the invitation.

Heather Hogan, I love the way you love your television characters.
Reading all your beautiful feels about PLL and Glee makes me so happy, and I haven’t watched either of those shows in years.
You are a treasure.

I don’t even know what you are talking about and I wish I did but I came back here to tell you I drank 2 glasses of wine tonight and watched this Glee episode and cried several times so thank you for inspiring me to do that.

The way Brittany and Santana were looking at each other in every scene smashed up my heart into the happiest little pieces and now I have all these joyous little jagged heart slivers coursing through my veins and slicing up my insides, filling me with love.

My own wedding took place in a courthouse after hours with my person and our 2 best friends, and I sobbed through the vows that I wrote and I had to stop twice to blow my nose because my face was a mess and it was so gross but like so perfect because then we were all cry-laughing and everyone should get to cry-laugh with the person they love about the never-ending snot running down their face on their wedding day, you know?

I am actually surprise by the praise of this episode. Is it the fact that brittana made it that we are ignoring how Klaine was forced down our throats when this episode should have been all about brittana, how annoying it was to smash their vows together…idk I guess I thought there would be more critqiue but ok. Anyways the parts with just Santana and Brittany were awesome and I loved them at the very end of the episode seemed like they were a real couple. I do feel sorry for anyone who isn’t apart of fandom because so much of this episode would not make sense….and idk it felt like Ryan Murphy just wanted to give brittana fans a bone to shut them up about how screwed up with those two characters. And I know why Quinn wasn’t there she wasn’t available for filing do to being overseas doing a USO concert….but still they could have i operates her some how

When I was 16 I was deep, deep in the Brittana fandom. For a good year the only thing I read was Brittana fanfiction, the first two years of my tumblr archive are just glee, and really and truly, the brittana fandom was the only queer community I had for most of high school. I stopped watching glee after season 3, I couldn’t do it anymore. The writing is shoddy, Ryan Murphy made me want to throw things at my tv, and I needed a hobby besides crying at fanfiction in the middle of the night. This episode is the first episode I’ve watched since the season 3 finale. And my 16-year old self is SO FUCKING HAPPY. I’m not emotionally invested in the characters anymore, but when I was 16, Brittany and Santana made me believe in true love. I hate that that’s true, but their love (and the attention given to it in fanfiction) gave me some inkling of hope that maybe someday I would meet my person and could live happily ever after. I remember the Valentine’s Day episode where they FINALLY kissed, that damn episode made me happy for weeks. I watched it over and over and over.

And now, what feels like a lifetime later, I have a real life queer community (thanks to autostraddle and a-camp, let’s be real). I have real people to be emotionally invested in rather than fictional characters, and the only queer people in my life aren’t just on tumblr. Seeing Brittany and Santana get married reminds me just how much I’ve grown up, and while their wedding didn’t make me tear up like I know it would have four years ago, reading this recap absolutely did. Because Heather is right. This honest to god dream come true on television is because of a fandom. The two people who I so badly wanted to live happily ever after are going to, and although I don’t care nearly as much as I used to about them, it still means the world to me to see it.

I have a lot of feelings about this episode:
1. I’ve been waiting for 6 years for glee to cover “hey yeah” and it was everything I could have wished for.
2. The wedding dress scene reminds me of the Lizzie McGuire Movie, especially Brit’s light up dress.
3. I want my future wedding to look exactly like this, with all of the pintresty/barn things, but I swear if anyone says a goddamn thing about us being “brave” or “inspirational” I’ll throw a fit. That was the most annoying part about this episode, and I hope I don’t have to explain why. Santana isn’t trying to be an inspiration, she’s just trying to marry her lady.
4. I want to comment on the Pierce Pierce line about needing to give a toaster, but target was closed…because that shit was hilarious and I’m sure my neighbors heard me laughing

Oh wow, I forgot Brittany even had a younger sister! I’m so used to watching PLL that I don’t even think teenager characters have parents, but yeah, it would have been neat to see Britt’s sister. I wonder who would have played her. That girl who plays Prim in The Hunger Games?

I was so excited about this wedding! I’ve been to plenty of weddings in real life that did not have the emotional effect of finally seeing our girls getting their happy ending. In a perfect world, would I have preferred it without a Klaine trim? Yes. But since I know the Gleeverse time continuum is running short, and we must invest time in stories we don’t care about, such as new New Directions and Warblers I’m focusing on the fact that the wedding happened. Also that Santana got her Abuela back.

Thank you Heather for this final recap of Brittana. Your words about Brittany and Santana knowing each other’s truths and it being a love that rearranges the alchemy of your soul were exactly what I craved. If the wedding didn’t already have me in tears, this was the final emotional dam breaker. I’m as in love with your writing as I am with these two fictional characters.

Thank you Riese for you clever snarky add ins and yes “Where is Quinn?” We all know where she was IRL, but for Gleeverse to not even offer one of their ridiculous expositions seemed crazy, given the importance of The Unholy Trinity friendship.

Lastly, thank you to Dorothy Snarker, because there was no way I believed that early that this could or would play out this way. And this amazing fandom who continued to believe and to fight back until they got their happily ever after.

In addition to being proud of the fandom for demanding more of Brittana, I think a huge credit and thank you should go out to Naya Rivera. She has definitely been the captain of this ship. She didn’t just appreciate us as her fans, but she fought right along with us for this relationship to be taken seriously. She never wavered in her belief that Brittany was Santana’s soulmate. She recognized the need for Santana’s story to be told, not just because it would boost her career and storyline, but because she knew many of her fans needed to see themselves represented on tv.

I am so happy for her and Ryan. My first thought when I heard the news was the scene during the performance Tik Tok and Brittany threw up and the only one to do so right after was Santana. In real life Heather is the first of the glee kids to have a baby, so life imitating art, I am not at all surprised that it’s Naya that follows suit. This is why I ship Heya as well as Brittana. They make it so easy for me to love them and see them thru lesbian-colored glasses.

Glee infuriated and alienated me so much a few years ago that I just stopped watching. I couldn’t deal with getting my feelings stomped on amongst other things.

But, I’ve watched a couple of episodes this season and had to watch the wedding episode. I thought it was uneven as hell and completely unrealistic. And, I was seriously pissed off they couldn’t even address the Quinn issue. But, I loved it too – despite all it’s ridiculousness. I did tear up and two of my OTPs, both of which I was convinced wouldn’t be allowed to last, got married (though I gotta admit, I really wanted each couple to have their own special day).

Anyway, I ramble. I just wanted to say how much I’ve enjoyed your recaps this season and your ongoing love for Brittana and its fandom. Your recap just summed it all up perfectly. I probably cried more reading it. Basically perfect recap is perfect.

Oh my God I have so many feelings about this episode. It wasn’t perfect. Like where the hell was Quinn,(Or Santana’s dad or Britt’s sister) and why was Klaine’s storyline so rushed, but the Brittana parts were amazing. Brittana hasn’t been this much of a focus on the show since season 2, and this time it’s a happy arc, and everything feels awesome. When I was a confused thirteen year old, unsure of who I was, suddenly Brittana was there.I never even saw being gay as a possibility before Glee. And then Landslide happened and all the locker scenes and just like that everything changed. As Santana began to realize that she was in love with her best friend, I was realizing the same thing right along with her. It feels good that a couple so important to me is getting some closure. My OTP has gotten married! And I need one of those hats 🙂

Heather, I sincerely wish I had read your recap before I watched the episode because the way you wrote about it made it sound so much more beautiful than I felt.

a) The Abuela bit was nice. I actually wish that you included the real dialogue because I actually really enjoyed Sue’s reverse “Sue”chology in pointing out the follies of Abuela’s bigotry.
b) They definitely reused the bridesmaid dresses for the foiled Finchel wedding.
c) wtf the Klaine aspects was so out of character for Santana and Britt that it’s insulting. No way in a million years would Santana go from destroying Kurt for interrupting her proposal to INSISTING THAT HE SHARE THE ALTAR WITH HER???
d) No fucking way would Schu be in the bridal party. No. Fucking. Way.
e) Having “Heya” be the wedding song is ridiculously meta. All the shipper portmanteaux. They’re not winking at the fandoms; they’re bludgeoning them with all this fanservice.
f) but seriously WHERE IS QUINN THIS IS RIDICULOUS. This is on the same level of her absence from the Finn Memorial episode. Her absence on both parts completely retcons her ENTIRE storyline from the show, what the ever loving fuck.

I am definitely disappointed that they hackneyed Klaine into this episode, mainly because if I were in the fandom, I would be incredibly insulted as to how the show has treated this couple this season. I mean, Kurt and Blaine as individuals have actually done some of the best character development so I’m happy for them, but all the circumstances that have been thrust on them this season is just so painful and cheap.

Thank you Heather for a fantastic recap. It’s been a wild ride and I still can’t believe a fairytale about 2 cheerleaders had a happy ending. The fandom may have shown you its blazing blue magic, but it also owes you and Reise and your friends/colleagues at Autostraddle and other sites like AE a big thank you for giving us a voice that could not be ignored. In today’s social media driven environment, I think “the powers that be” can pick up the emotional thread expressed by the masses but they can often discount, or aren’t able to ascertain, the essential arguments because those arguments arise from a cacophonous, emotionally-charged din. You and your fellow writers organized and articulated our thoughts so well and gave us a platform to present those opinions so the messages were delivered. Thanks for being our champions then, now and forever.

This episode may not be perfect (though I will do everything I can to fanfic it into perfection, with everybody’s sisters, parents and Quinn being there, all Britt’s unicorn-trolling wisely explained and Wonder Woman being a real person in Glee-verse ), but this recap sure is.
Thank you, Heather, for the prefect recap. I hope both you and Riese (and everyone who watched with you) managed to enjoy this episode at least a little.
Thank you for recapping this show through all its ups and downs. Mostly downs)
And thank you for this happily ever after. I’m sure we wouldn’t get it without you being there rooting for Brittana (what Cara said). You may have stopped believing like any rational adult would, but this is your victory, too.

I haven’t seen the episode yet but I definitely cried just reading the recap. It makes me wish someone with more tech savvy than me could put together a Brittana-only version of Glee to keep forever. As crazy and flawed and sidelined as it was at times, this was my first lesbian love story and I almost wish it meant less to me. Thanks lesbian blogger community for making it go here.

I’m still mad Kurt and Blaine got married. I mean congrats to that fandom but if ever there were two people on this show who were destined to crash and burn it is these two. They have serious communication issues and rushing into a marriage is not the way to solve it. I see a lot of infidelity and an eventual split in my Post-Glee headcannon.

I too would have liked to have seen Santana’s dad since she did talk about him more than any of her other family members. I was happy to see abuela again though despite her bigotry. That actress also plays Jane’s grandma on Jane The Virgin. And Gloria Estefan is always a good time. Brittany’s parents were perfectly cast as well. The only actress other than Coolridge who might have been a better mother for Brit is Lisa Kudrow.

This episode was so amazing, I teared up. I finally got the feeling that Brit & Santana were a couple, and Kurt & Blaine like always make my heart explode with their cuteness I can’t even handle it. This episode was filled with so much happy!!

I totally agree with Riese’s point about Tina. Girl can’t get a break, it’s terrible.

Did anyone else notice that the show is trying to conceal/minimize the gay kissing scenes? When Brittana & Klaine kissed at the wedding, Klaine was in shadow, and Brit was covering their faces partially? I noticed this in previous episodes this season when Brittana kiss they are totally in shadow and you can’t see anything!! Even with all this progress, are they trying to hide the kissing? Or am I reading too much into this?

lol, I loved the dialogue that you wrote between Abuela and Sue. All the commentary on the Bible was pretty correct.

Sorry to be out of the loop but what did “Hey ya!” have to do with Brittanna fandom?

This episode is another example of how I HATE what they did with Tina’s character. She never got a good episode or decent storyline the entire series. Though, the actress did well with what little she was given.

But, this recap was beautifully written. You’re right that this wedding showed the power of social media and fandom. I think the actors playing Santana and Brittany have so much chemistry that they really make the relationship seem sweet and authentic. I’ve cried at many Brittanna moments. I’d say they did an overall good job w/ this episode.

The abuela scene made me cry so hard, because all I kept thinking about was my grandmom and if she would ever do that. Yes, abuela still thinks women marrying women is wrong, but something must have changed even a little bit if she’s showing up to her nieta’s wedding. And maybe when she sees how happy Brittany and Santana are, she’ll change her mind. And maybe my grandmom will change her mind.